Monday, January 17, 2011

January 17, 2011 - last Monday at TIRR




This is the last week for Jim being a patient at TIRR hospital. He's doing so well that we just hate that he has to leave. It's the insurance company's decision, not ours. Thursday he will move to Manor Care Sharpview.

He played with the pegboard during occupational therapy this morning. He did really well! He could pick the pegs up and put them back in their holes. This is a manual dexterity exercise. He also was able to hold a cup and drink with a long straw.

We spoke with Todd, the rep for Permobile, the electric wheelchair company, too. He explained how Jim will be able to use bluetooth technology to move a computer mouse with his wheelchair hand controls. He said he would help Jim set the system up when his chair is delivered. I also ordered a bluetooth device for his cell phone. It will be great to know that I can stay in contact with Jim. I have to depend on nurses to relay messages now.

We went to the cafeteria for my lunch. Jim wanted the day's special - popcorn shrimp. He ate them mostly without my assistance. I put an ordinary plastic fork in his wrist splint. He was even dipping the shrimp in ketchup before bringing them smoothly up to his mouth. We are so excited that his fingers are getting stronger.

Jim worked really hard during physical therapy, too. He was working on balancing and exercising the muscles that he will need to do his own sliding board transfers. He needs to strengthen his hip flexors and hamstrings. Then he had functional group followed by group exercise. He got exhausted.

We went back up to his room. I shaved him and washed his hair. The tech got him back into bed. Then I fed him a chef salad for dinner. He fell right to sleep after he ate. He didn't sleep well last night. He had lots of pain in his legs. He had the tech move him and he asked for tylenol. It took one and half hours until the nurse brought in his tylenol. He was in so much pain then that he took tramadol, too. He said he finally got to sleep at around 2 AM. At 4 AM they woke him up for his bowel program.

The nurses and techs are being delayed by a new computer system being put into effect this week. There are IT people all over the hospital but still it takes much longer to input the data into the computer then it did before this new system.

Jim put in a hard day of workouts despite being so tired today.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Good job, y'all.

Marguerite